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In 1998, Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters, a book of poems addressed, with only two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, who had committed suicide over 30 years earlier. In a letter to their son Nicholas, Hughes explained the decision to publish. “What I was needing to do, all those years,” he wrote, “was deal with what had happened to your mother and me. [...] I did find a way of dealing with it – not by writing about it directly, but dealing with the deep emotional tangle of it indirectly, through other symbols, which is the best and most natural way.”

Max Porter is an editor at Granta and Portobello Books; his slim, Guardian First Book Award-longlisted debut follows a bereaved father – and Hughes scholar – who deals with the death of his young wife through one of his hero’s signature symbols: Hughes’s violent, elemental Crow. The novella opens as his children (“small boys with remote-control cars and ink-stamp sets”) learn that “this was a new life and Dad was a different type of Dad now and we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum”. Well-meaning neighbours drop by with endless lasagnes while Dad can barely hold it together, in a house that is now “a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers”.

Suddenly, with a hearty stench and a rustle of feathers, there’s a knock at the door: a huge bird lifts bleary-eyed Dad a foot off the ground and demands that he say hello. “I won’t leave,” intones Crow, “until you don’t need me any more.” It’s deeply comic and hopelessly sad.

Max Porter's novella is inspired by Ted Hughes' symbol of the crowCredit:
Alamy

There isn’t much plot; rather, this bizarre set-up is the springboard for a meditation, in vignettes, on grief, love and literature. It’s narrated in turns by three distinct voices: Dad, wistful and weary; Boys, both innocent and wise, fond of fighting and climbing trees; and Crow, earthy, uncivilised, with a penchant for picture books and a hard line on house rules, serving at once as babysitter, therapist and metafictional trope.

Porter’s rhythmic prose is balanced delicately between humour and poignancy, to catch the reader continually off guard. His language is playful, full of delicious compound adjectives, surprising similes, evocative assonance and onomatopoeia.

The novella’s form is chameleon, shifting between interior monologue, almost-poetry and play-like dialogue; one section is followed by a set of comprehension questions, while in others text repeats, subtly and meaningfully altered. Porter’s joyfully allusive technique celebrates such tinkering: just as he entered their household without warning, so Crow is a literary interloper, too, changing – even vandalising – past texts and making them new.

The epitaph is a poem by Emily Dickinson, a word on each line crossed out and replaced, in handwritten capitals, by the word “CROW”. Crow has even forged his own identity outside of his literary antecedent: this isn’t Hughes’s contrary, maverick creature, who squares up to God and watches on while civilisation implodes. Porter’s gruff Crow is a wonderful creation: incongruously maternal, haunted by bad dreams in which his deep-set violent streak escapes, his speech – which often descends into wild word association – teetering on the edge of joyful incoherence: “Krickle krackle, hop sniff and tackle, in with the bins, singing the hymns”.

Motherless children being saved from adversity by a friendly animal is an ancient fairy-tale trope, and the narrative is full of elliptical fables, introduced by a refrain of “Once upon a time”. (There’s no wicked stepmother, though: bar a sweetly hilarious scene where bumbling Dad beds a Plath scholar he meets at a conference, the family remains a tight unit of three plus crow.)

In The Uses of Enchantment, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued that fairy tales allow children to combat their fears in symbolic terms, and the tales Crow and the Boys tell – psychological variations on reality – suffuse the healing process even further with literary truths. These fairy tales are couched beautifully – especially a gleeful one in which Crow beats up a “tabloid-despicable” shape-shifting demon – but for me, the most moving sections remain the straightest: Dad’s open-hearted outpouring of grief; the boys smashing up their father’s possessions in pure rage; their understated affection for Dad (“We had to take the p--- out of him as hard as we possibly could. We were convinced that it was what our Mum would have wanted. It was our best way of loving him, and thanking him”).

Funny and warm and real, this little book is one to linger on and savour.